I use Microcosm for almost all of my outdoor renders. Microcosm comes with 4 base environment figures: Microcosm round and square, and Macrocosm round and square. Each of those four come in several UV mapping varieties, from 1x1 tiled to 72x72 tiled. The higher numbers are particularly useful for the Macrocosms, a relatively small texture map will still give you sharp and fast renders. Sizes: Microcosm at 100% scale is about 3 meters in diameter, Macrocosm is much, much larger (I guess about 100 meters in diameter). Ease of use: pretty good. It uses INJ/REM poses for its morphs, and the supplied styles look nice. Lots of free addon styles and materials. The manual that comes with the product is clear and extensive. And for just about everything there's a MAT/MOR pose. One click and you're done. It's the most versatile environment product I know. Renders: Reasonable. Much depends on what you do with the textures - adding displacement will slow down renders but will increase detail. When using Poser 5/6, I recommend using polygon smoothing on the Macrocosm figures. A skydome is a half sphere turned inside out, so that the textures are displayed on the inside. Think of a snow globe, at an immense scale. Your figures, terrains, lights and cameras live INSIDE the snow globe. The main advantage is to be found in animation. When you animate the camera, the sky keeps on looking natural. Environment programs such as Vue and Bryce use skydomes (you can't turn them off) that limit the maximum size of the scene (to about several miles in diameter, it's not exactly a small snow globe!). Poser doesn't have a skydome by default, which means that the maximum dimension of a Poser scene is virtually unlimited. Microcosm does not come with a skydome. But RDNA has a free skydome that works well with Microcosm/Macrocosm, including several sky textures as MAT poses. The funny thing is, while polygon smoothing is a good idea for Macrocosm, it's NOT a good idea for the skydome. Hope this helps, Steven.

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